Family Storytime: Soup!

Despite the weather being unusually warm for February, we had a fun storytime all about soup! I really liked this theme because as unique as it is, it has some great books to pair with it. I was thinking I could do winter foods (hot chocolate, stew, chili, etc.) if I couldn't find enough soup books, but using inter-library loan, everything came together perfectly and I had a variety of books to sample.

Surprisingly, the kids weren't so enthusiastic this time around to do the bean bag song. My guess is it had to do with them taking advantage of the nice weather earlier by playing outside and they became exhausted. 

Our first soup story was Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic. This is a hilarious picture book about Max the Duck cooking his first pot of soup but is believed to be missing by his friends. Brody, Dakota, and Bebe can't find their quackie friend and their imaginations quickly spin out of control. 

After hearing how Max prepared his soup, we had to make our own pot of imaginary soup. I brought a cooking pot in and after disappointingly finding out that my local dollar store ran out of plastic toy vegetables, we used laminated vegetable clip art to make our soup. I handed out a few veggies to each in the group and called out vegetables. We went over the colors and tossed them into our pot. I stirred the pot and we all pretended to slurp our delicious vegetable soup. The kids loved this and I was impressed with how much fun they had with their imaginations. 

Our second story, Making Minestrone by Stella Blackstone and Nan Brooks, took care of our (ahem, or maybe my) rhyming fix. This is a story that step-by-step shows how a group of friends prepare minestrone together, complete with a grocery list and recipe. 

Before we got to our third book, we went over some of the types of vegetables and their colors of those that I had laminated. It was supposed to be a guessing game where I take one veggie away and the kids have to guess which one, but the laminated pieces with felt on the back were not sticking to the flannel board for anything. An easy improvise and the kids still had fun. I ended this a little early so we could do some more reading together. 

Slop Goes the Soup by Pamela D. Edwards and Henry Cole is a fun book about all the noises that we hear when we make, and sometimes get messy, with soup. The group liked making the noises along with me and found the book quite comical.

I happened to have two families show up after our third book, so I asked the group if they wanted to hear one more story. I got a resounding yes, so we read on and those who just walked in were able to get a story...or two in!

Soup for One by Ethan Long makes the idea of flies invading a bowl of soup entertaining as we count the flies as we go, noticing the curious spider who always seems to be watching. I liked the art in this one.

Our final story was Is that Wise, Pig? by Jan Thomas. Cow and Pig are making Mouse some soup, but Pig wants to add umbrellas and galoshes into the mix. "Is that wise, Pig?" You'll find out in the end of this silly story. 

 It was great to be able to read five stories without losing the kids' attention spans!

For our craft, we made alphabet soup. We had a bunch of leftover letter stickers so this worked out nicely and the craft turned out so cute. The younger kids tried spelling out their names and the other kids had fun coming up with words we could make from their alphabet soup. 

This storytime was mmm, mmm, good!